Every time you hear someone on NPR say that we're "hard wired" to do this or that, when you read them use the word "meme" online, most of the time when you hear someone say that our "genes make us" this way or that way, what you're hearing is materialist ideology presented as science. The same is true probably 99 out of 100 times when you hear someone say "neuroscience has discovered" something about "the human brain" or, in fact, probably a large majority of the time you hear about something to do with any of the social sciences in 2016. Anything that insists, or asserts or implies that consciousness, behavior or "human nature" is the product of structures in our brains or "in our genes" - in just about every case something which hasn't actually been discovered but which is assumed to be there - is an assumption of materialism. I won't, for now, go into my year long challenge that you both didn't begin to understand and which annoyed you so much.
It's not my fault if your vast knowledge of science gained from reading popular magazine articles or, more likely, watching NOVA on PBS or some piece of crap on cable TV doesn't let you in on the fact that the culture of science in the 19th and 20th century has often been overlaid with and motivated by materialist ideology, at times as much as if not more so than by the rigorous application of valid scientific methods. And, unsurprisingly, scientists are, actually, on average, probably far more aware of that than non-scientists who report on science, who present science in the media and certainly more than the average blog bloviator on what they, often in their sheer ignorance, assert to be science since they don't know more than what some non-scientist scribbler has written, or more likely said about it in the media. If even that much.
Not that many, even very famous scientists. some of them actually rather eminent, come down as favoring rigorous application of valid scientific methods, many of the most famous names in science have made a career in asserting materialist ideology as science, quite often when their actual active career in science is waning.
It has been my experience of talking to those whose careers involve applying rigorous scientific method that they are often aware of that to one extent or other. One of my relatives who has been quite well respected in her field can be rather bitter on the topic of who gets funded and who doesn't on that basis. Her field is insufficiently glamorous, not providing enough ideological cachet to get much attention, though it is extremely important to that little detail so often ignored by celebrity science, the possibility we might survive.
There really is a quite remarkable disconnect between science which is strictly science and science which is mostly about materialist ideology. I don't know enough about the history of individual sciences to be able to posit a guess as to the influence of the ideology of those involved in many cases, especially those who found a certain branch of study. It is ironic that genetics, which began in the discoveries of the Augustinian priest, Fr. Gregor Mendel, has become one of those areas of science most firmly asserted to be the tool of some of the most rigid materialists in science. I would guess that has to do with such figures as James Watson and Francis Crick being fanatical materialists.
The alleged science of abiogenesis was begun explicitly in an assertion of materialism by Alexander Oparin, who asserted that it would prove that there was no non-material aspect of life. And scientists have been making up one "origin of life" after another after another, all asserting that their ideological speculations about that were science. Though, since the actual origin of life on Earth is and will certainly remain unavailable for inspection and analysis, abiogenesis asserting to study the origin of life on Earth can never, really, be science. And even in the, literally, miraculous event of THE FIRST AND ORIGINAL ORGANISM TO HAVE LIVED ON EARTH being found and securely identified, it is improbable by a stupendous factor that it would yield solid, secure information about how it was formed, how it made the jump from being a nonliving assembly to being a living being.
Since I assume that orthodox science is correct and there was ONE original organism from which all subsequent life is descended, when you're talking about the origin of life, especially, when you assert as materialist, inevitably atheist, biologists do, that life came about as a result of entirely random physical events, you're talking about a line of such events that, somehow, resulted in a viable, metabolizing, reproducing object which succeeded in performing some of the most incredibly improbable events without it or its first offspring dying in the process. You can't discover how it happened without being able to observe how it, in fact, did happen and abiogenesis will never be able to do that. The identification of the field as science, when it's actually applied materialist ideology hasn't gotten it excluded from the halls of science anymore than other equally if not more ideological schools of speculation, multi-verse cosmology, huge swaths of the social sciences, much of the assertion surrounding natural selection, all of which are not the product of rigorous observation of nature or even the material universe.
Several times I have pointed out something about much of contemporary physics and cosmology that I first read criticized by the atheist, I assume materialist, mathematician and critic of the current state of cosmology, Peter Woit, something best exemplified in this statement by Hawking and Leonard Molodinov in their best seller, The Grand Design
We seem to be at a critical point in the history of science, in which we must alter our conception of goals and of what makes a physical theory acceptable. It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle. The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and different forms in different universes.
The most famous of all current physicists and a through going materialist ideologue, in that statement, is demanding that he be allowed to ignore not only the requirement for, not only direct observation of nature, but also the requirement that at sometime in the future that would be even theoretically possible. He went even further than that and demanded that such "science" is exempted from being coherent with physical principle and even logic. And his fellow scientists in that field have not condemned it as insisting that he and his colleagues have the right to make stuff up that is not even logical and they get to call it, not only science, but a representation of the natural universe. Which is an amazing, real life phenomenon of the decadence that ideology has led science into.
When I was poking some rather mild fun at the assertion Mike Gimbel, the Left Forum Marxist who was whining that Stephen Hawking is insufficiently ideological, that his ideological speculations didn't conform to the ideological theories of Marx, Engles and Hegel, I was merely pointing out the irony that materialism, imposing ideology on science, removing the defining methods of rigorous observation of nature, of rigorous measurement and analysis, which such scientists as Hawking have insisted they don't need* to achieve scientific validity, is producing decadent science, decadent by the very definition of what science is. But they are then criticized as ideologically decadent by even more ideological atheists than themselves because they are TOO WEDDED TO THE METHODS OF SCIENCE even as they are demanding an exemption from them. And as I was reading that description of his book, I realized I'd read something quite similar Joseph Weizenbaum's description Michael Polanyi's reaction to Nicolai Bukharin's assertion that science will be governed by the exigencies of the Five Year Plan in the glorious communist future.
Materialist - atheist ideology would seem to be eating science from inside. I wish it were possible to measure how much of the quickly invalidated science that is massively funded, massively constructed and quickly shoved aside flows from ideological motivation instead of rigorous application of the classical methods of science, my guess is it accounts for almost as much as that which is motivated by sheer professional ambition - perhaps best considered materialism of a more vulgar variety. I think it is safe to say that it accounts for most of the social science which is discarded into that huge resting place, the boneyard of discontinued science.
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